XOXOX,
San Francisco Center for the Book Monotype Marathon VI, San Jose Institute
for Contemporary Art Works Gallery, San Jose

ARTIST STATEMENT
These blouses grew out of my past experience as a maker of custom wedding gowns.
Making custom-fitted clothing is an extremely intimate process; the pattern pieces
perfectly follow the contours of the individual's body, no matter how "imperfect."
These garments are metaphors for the unconscious mental constructs that people
tailor to themselves in adaptation to their life experiences and wear daily without
a second thought.

The headgear series deals with how people unconsciously impose
on themselves ways of being that result from adaptations to critical life experiences.
An individual may develop a strong set of convictions, fundamentally altering
the way he or she functions in the world. Though such constructs initially exist
in a purely mental realm, because of the energy invested in maintaining the beliefs,
to the individual they become concrete. My interest was in translating such ultimately
insubstantial beliefs into actual artifacts.